Putting Germany Back Together: The Fabulous Bush and Baker Boys

Name the three greatest moments in the history of American statecraft. The first, the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, is surely beyond debate. For a mere $15 million and without shedding a drop of blood, President Thomas Jefferson more than doubled the size of the United States. With a brilliant mix of bluff and bluster, Jefferson not only outmaneuvered three great powers--France, Britain, and Spain--but also removed them as threats to the future expansion of the young republic. Those Americans "conquer without war," wrote the French envoy Louis Marie Turreau, expressing his surly admiration for the clever diplomacy of the Yankee upstarts.

The decade after World War II also deserves a five-star ranking. Indeed, 1945-55 is the golden age of American foreign policy, even though gainsayers would downplay the quality of U.S. diplomacy, pointing to America's towering predominance.-1 In those years the United States focused on building a strong institutional framework, reflected in an alphabet soup of acronyms: U.N., IMF, OEEC, WEU, ECSC, GATT, NATL, plus subsidiary alliances such as SEATO and CENTO. Add to that list the rearmament of West Germany in 1955, which completed the natl structure. Those who pooh-pooh these institutions as instances of pactomania or imperialism miss the point. The secret of their success lay in their transcendence: dedicated to the common welfare, they served American interests by serving those of others. No other hegemonic power--from Rome to Great Britain--had so profitably hitched its national interests to the well-being of other nations.

The third period deserving at least a magna cum laude coincides with the presidency of a most unlikely candidate, George Bush. Though he could never quite get his sentences straight, from 1989 to 1993 he presided over an extraordinary chapter in American diplomacy. First, a great power--the Soviet Union--expired peacefully on his watch. Yet as Martin Wight, the British student of international politics, has put it, a great power never "dies in its bed"; before breathing their last, the losers have historically unleashed a major war. Second, though with a little help from his friend Margaret Thatcher, Bush masterminded the Persian Gulf War coalition against Iraq's Saddam Hussein. This achievement is particularly impressive considering that the alliance harnessed not only the cranky French, but also a slew of Arab states not often enamored of the United States or one another. Washington relegated Israel, bridling under Iraqi Scud missile attacks, to the sidelines and deftly extracted billions of dollars in tribute from the two notorious fence sitters, Germany and Japan.

The final masterly feat of this phase was German reunification. All of Germany in the West--that was a dream that seemed to have died for good in 40 years of Cold War. Its absurdity had become an article of faith. It was widely thought that the Soviet Union would never yield the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the very brace of its empire in Eastern Europe; no matter how exhausted, it would not swallow so brutal a revision of the balance of power in Europe. At best the Soviet Union would accept con-federation or neutralization in the guise of a natl-dissolving European security structure. And yet Mikhail Gorbachev did let go, and by 1994 the last Russian troops had left the country that had been the chief cause and venue of the tensest moments of the Cold War.

GORBACHEV'S BUNGLE

In Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, two Bush administration officials now ensconced in Harvard and Stanford respectively, record the diplomatic maneuvering behind the reunification of Germany. Their book comes a bit late in the game but was well worth the wait. Previously we have had to rely on memoirs by the actors themselves or on accounts by academics and journalists, which suffer from the usual drawbacks. Participants tend to burnish the record, while outsiders must rely on public sources and on interviews with officials who like to add to the gloss.

Zelikow and Rice, National Security Council staffers at the time, were also involved in the events they describe, and they too cite public sources and private interviews. But they had two enormous advantages. As the preface notes, Zelikow had access to the relevant State Department, White House, and intelligence documents. Moreover, as the authors' research proceeded, East German and Soviet state archives began to crack open, yielding, for instance, papers prepared for the Soviet Politburo. With these revealing sources, the authors shaved decades off the 25 or 50 years that normally stand between the historian and the official documents; some of the American records they used remain classified to this day. With more than a hundred pages of notes, the book is a rich quarry for contemporary historians.

How was Germany reunified? The first answer has nothing to do with the finesse of the fabulous Bush and Baker boys but much to do with the thickness of the Gorbachev crowd. In the fall of 1989, when not all dies had been cast, Gorbachev committed a blunder that will eventually rank alongside such historic bloopers as Napoleon III's declaration of war on Prussia in 1870 and Saddam's refusal to grab any of a dozen diplomatic opportunities to stop the American war machine in its tracks. Failing to authorize force against the gathering East German crowds in October 1989, as the Honecker regime demanded, or to brandish the first commandment of bipolarity--no tilting of the balance--at the West, Gorbachev grievously miscalculated.